Reflections of a middle-aged geek

About

I’m Felix Almeida, also known as Ahriman in some circles. This is techwords.io, where I post the result of my personal research on things (mostly technical) that I found interesting at some point. I hope that other people will find these posts helpful, relevant, or interesting. This blog, its content and opinions are my own.

I live in Toronto, Ontario with my wife where I constantly struggle to find time, between my job and our kids, to study and write about things that I like. I’m currently interested in information security.

My interest in computers started in 1985 when I got my first computer, the ZX Spectrum. A couple years later I moved on to the Apple //e, where I spent uncountable hours learning everything I could. Finally in the early 90’s I built my own PC (i486DX-50) and it didn’t took long to install my first Linux distribution on it: Yggdrasil (I bet you’ve never heard of this one). Ah, the joy of manually configuring XFree86 and compiling the Linux kernel 1.0! In 1995, while I was still an undergraduate student, I created the Linux network for the Computer Science Department (only in Portuguese) that is still in use by the students there! I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in the late 90’s and since then I’ve worked on different things for several companies. I currently work at Ethoca, but I’m not speaking on behalf of the company here.

I consider myself a mix between a software engineer and a system administrator. Despite what other people might say, I am a generalist; I like to know a bit about a lot of things so I can dig deeper whenever needed. I enjoy reading mainly about computers (obviously), personal finance and science (especially cosmology and biology). I don’t sleep too much. My political view is more aligned with the liberals and I don’t follow any particular religion although I am a spiritualist (there must be a meaning for all this after all).